Guest Review: The Hunger Games (movie)

The Hunger Games movie has been released.  Has it satisfied its intended audience?  To find out, I've asked teenager heartthrob and LEGO maniac, G. A. Nightstalker to present this review...

The Hunger Games takes place in a post-apocalyptic North America. Personally, I have assumed that this was a zombie apocalypse which started in North America, then moved to some other continent. Then the survivors created Panem (Latin or somethin’ for bread), with the Capitol, which controlled the area, and its thirteen districts. Just remember that a zombie apocalypse is not actually part of the storyline, that’s just an assumption on my part.

After a while, the districts rebelled against the Capitol. The rebellion was put down, District 13 destroyed; and to remind the districts that the Capitol was in control, the tradition of the Hunger Games began, where they would take a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18 from each of the 12 districts. These teenagers, known as tributes, would face off against each other in an arena, until there was only one survivor out of the 24.

I read The Hunger Games a few years ago, around the time when it came out, and so I was really hyped up about the movie. The trailer was amazing, and everyone got tickets for the midnight showing. A few kids at my school expected it to be a letdown, which brought my spirits down a bit, but I was still excited.

Then I went to the midnight showing and saw the movie.

The acting was simply stunning, better than most in movies I’ve seen. Each person got their act right. Effie Trinket was hilarious, always getting upset about the most trivial things. “Hey! That’s mahogany!” Haymitch was funny, too, and his personality was exactly as I’d imagined him while reading the book. Katniss was serious and didn’t talk much, which was perfect, and Peeta really was good at getting people to like him.

Unlike some other movies (Percy Jackson, The Last Airbender, etc.) this movie didn’t stray from its origins, the book written by Suzanne Collins. When I heard that Collins would be working on set and writing the script, that just made me even more excited. Getting Collins to help with the movie was a very smart move.

Now the editing is where it could have been done a bit better. While the shaky camera filming captured the way everything was all over the place and complex, sometimes things were a bit too shaky. At points, it was hard to see exactly what was going on, and it seemed like someone trying to throw the camera at the actors. Never throw a camera at actors, by the way. They don’t like that.

The way that suspense built up throughout certain parts was perfect, and though some parts were left out of the book, I think that this movie was really good.  It makes you feel empathy with the characters and sympathy for them; it’ll make you laugh. It replaces The Dark Knight and Inception as my favorite movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it now!